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The ad that really got Pirella noticed was for a brand called Jesus Jeans, launched in 1974 by MCT (Maglificio Calzificio Torinese), the company that makes Kappa sportswear today. According to Pirella, the brand was vaguely inspired by the previous year's hit musical
Jesus Christ Superstar
. Clearly something provocative was needed, so a young photographer named Oliviero Toscani was hired to shoot a young woman wearing the jeans, the zipper open in a manner that indicated she was not wearing any underwear, while casting a coy shadow over the evidence. Pirella's copy read: ‘Thou shalt not have any jeans but me.' Mixing fashion, sex and religion – in a Catholic country? No wonder Pirella got himself in the papers. The second execution was the line, ‘Whoever loves me, follows me', printed over a pert bottom in denim hot-pants. (The bottom, by the way, was that of Toscani's girlfriend at the time.) The Jesus Jeans brand clearly hasn't stood the test of time, but the furore surrounding the campaign did much for Pirella's career.

After five years, Agenzia Italia did a deal with BBDO that allowed the US agency entry into Italy. But in the end the new relationship didn't suit Pirella, and he and Göttsche pulled out in 1981 to start another independent shop called Pirella Göttsche.

‘The first clients that called us are the type I prefer working with. Not the market leaders or the big brands that stick to the rules and try to maintain the status quo. I like the challengers, the number three in the market, the brand that is forced to take risks and break the rules. And we got a lot of those. In a few years we went from four guys to seventy, then eighty.'

In the early 1990s Pirella succumbed to the advances of another international group: this time Interpublic, which made Pirella Göttsche part of the Lowe group – the network that had grown out of Frank Lowe's original London agency. The marriage seemed to work, although Pirella hadn't finished innovating. In 2000 he launched the Scuola di Emanuele Pirella (‘The Emanuele Pirella School'), a training centre for budding creatives that was also a real live agency – a modern version of apprenticeship.

The rebel who sold Jesus Jeans had gone respectable: he had become the sage of Italian advertising. Even in those days, Pirella was part of a vanishing generation. But while their artisanal approach may seem out of step with the digital world, writing is still a craft that needs to be honed.

In the meantime, Oliviero Toscani had taken an altogether different approach to his career.

Blood, sweaters and tears

‘I am not an advertising man,' Oliviero Toscani points out, ‘I am a photographer.'

Of course – but Toscani's disquieting images for Benetton enlivened the advertising scene of the nineties, and may have been responsible for the vogue in so-called ‘shock advertising'. It was certainly hard not to gawp at photos of a priest kissing a nun, a newborn baby with the umbilical cord still attached, or a dying AIDS patient surrounded by waxen-faced relatives – hardly the images you expected to see from the window of your commuter train. With the blessing of his client, Toscani created a giant public photography exhibition that was also an ambiguous running commentary on society. It made audiences think – and it made Benetton notorious.

The son of a photojournalist for
Corriere Della Sera
, Oliviero Toscani was born in Milan in 1942. He studied photography and graphic design at the Kunstgewerbeschule in Zürich from 1961 to 1965. He became a sought-after fashion photographer, working for
Elle
,
Vogue
,
GQ
,
Stern
and other leading titles. (After a while he found the job unfulfilling, once comparing a well-known supermodel to ‘a washing machine'.) In addition, his lens provided imagery for brands such as Fiorucci, Esprit and Chanel. But in adland his name is most closely associated with that of Benetton.

Luciano Benetton started the family firm in 1965 with his brothers Gilberto and Carlo and his sister Giuliana. In fact, it was Giuliana who knitted the first ever Benetton sweater for Luciano, an item that prompted many admiring remarks and sparked the idea for a business. In 1982, when Benetton hired Toscani, the company had never advertised. But export sales were rising and communications had taken on a new importance.

Benetton was introduced to Toscani through their mutual friend, the fashion magnate Elio Fiorucci. Recalling their first meeting in an interview with
The Independent
newspaper, Benetton said, ‘I didn't have any particular suggestions or restrictions to guide [Toscani], except that the campaign had to be different – very different – and that it had to be international. I had figured that the traditional system of advertising with a different campaign in each country wasn't the way ahead. I… wanted to make people aware of the spirit of the company' (‘How we met', 22 August 1999).

For his part, Toscani felt that Benetton was ‘essentially a teenager… in the sense that he doesn't have the cynicism that comes as we grow up: he is rash, he has the courage to try new things and see whether they work. I thought, “Here I can learn something, do something new.” '

In the same article, Benetton recalled Toscani's first campaign: ‘It was for a line of children's clothes, and instead of using kids he used teddy bears. I realized early on that he had extraordinary vision.'

But the teddy bears gave laughably little indication of how far Toscani would push his Benetton campaigns. His earliest images appropriated the theme of multiculturalism (‘United Colors of Benetton'), and although they remained within the boundaries of acceptable taste, they were already ahead of their time. Towards the end of the decade, though, Toscani's work became more provocative, with an image of a black woman breastfeeding a white baby. This was followed a short time later by a picture of two little girls, one white and one black. The black girl's hair had been sculpted into the shape of two devilish horns. Was the ad racist – or was it a comment on racism? It was impossible to tell, which was exactly what Toscani had intended. This was no longer advertising: it was fuel for debate.

The provocations continued throughout the 1990s: a nun kissing a priest, mating horses, a bloodstained Bosnian soldier's uniform, black and white wrists manacled together, the aforementioned AIDS victim… The willingness of the press to deplore images that it would not have hesitated to exploit for its own ends guaranteed swathes of media coverage for Benetton and Toscani. In the meantime, the pair launched a stylish photography magazine,
Colors
, and a pioneering art school, Fabrica – ‘an electronic Bauhaus'.

Some articles sneeringly referred to the fact that Toscani had once compared his relationship with Benetton to that of Michelangelo and the Pope; but the jibes missed the point. What he meant was that he
saw his work as art, and that he did not see any contradiction in the fact that it was funded by advertising. The original source is probably a quote in
The Guardian
newspaper: ‘Historically, a lot of art was publicity. It was selling an ideology or a product. In the Church, for example, Renaissance artists worked for the Pope. We all work for the Pope. There is always a Pope somewhere' (‘Death is the last pornographic issue left', 2 February 1998).

Toscani could have quietly exhibited his imagery in a gallery in the depths of New York's SoHo, where it would have generated little more than a raised eyebrow. Instead, thanks to the patronage of Benetton, he was able to confront the wider public with discomfiting scenes torn from the world around them. To an extent the images were pointless: they weren't offering any solutions, and Benetton didn't appear to actively support any of the causes it latched on to. But Toscani was not in the business of providing easy answers, just raising difficult questions. And one thing was for sure: he certainly didn't set out to sell sweaters. Instead, he considered that Benetton was funding research into alternative approaches to communication. ‘A sweater has two sleeves, wool is wool,' he told
The Guardian
. ‘The product is more or less the same. The difference is the communications.'

Other advertisers of the 1990s seemed keen to emulate Benetton. Confrontation was the order of the day. Coyness was abandoned, taboos were attacked; sex and swearing came streaking out of the closet. The British ‘master of shockvertising', as
The Express
newspaper dubbed him (8 June 2001), was TBWA's Trevor Beattie. In truth, Beattie's much-talked-about ad for the Wonderbra was more sensual than shocking. The poster featured the supermodel Eva Herzigova showing off a décolletage that could literally stop traffic, accompanied by the words, ‘Hello Boys'. A little nearer the knuckle was Beattie's campaign for French Connection UK, which made use of the fashion brand's initials in the form FCUK. ‘FCUK Fashion!' yelled a poster, to growls of media disapproval.

Not long afterwards, fashion designer Tom Ford commissioned an image of the voluptuous Sophie Dahl lying invitingly naked apart from, presumably, a dab of advertiser Yves Saint Laurent's Opium perfume. Was the picture shocking, sexist – or just harmlessly titillating? Opinion was divided. The ad was the latest in a trend that the fashion community had branded ‘porno chic'.

Commenting on the ‘shockvertising' phenomenon, Trevor Beattie observed, ‘These ads aren't shocking; what is shocking is the rank mediocrity of 90 per cent of British advertising, which means that anything remotely different stands out.'

The same article pointed out that, thanks to Toscani's advertising, Benetton had recently been judged the 10th most powerful brand in fashion (‘Why shock tactics work like a dream',
Sunday Business
, 29 August 1999).

But if shock advertising was in vogue (not to mention in
Vogue
), Toscani was the doyen of the genre. His work was far darker and more serious than anything attempted by his contemporaries. His final campaign for Benetton was the most controversial of all. It featured pictures of men facing execution on death row. As might have been expected, it generated a storm of outrage in the United States, with calls for a boycott of Benetton products.

A little while later, in May 2000, Benetton and Toscani went their separate ways, ending an extraordinary 18-year partnership. In a press release at the time, Luciano Benetton thanked Toscani for his ‘fundamental contribution' to the company. Toscani simply stated that it was time to move on.

The clothing company may have come to regret Toscani's departure, as its advertising slumped into cosy conformity. Certainly, nobody defaced its posters or was gnashing and wailing about it in the press. In fact, nobody spoke about it much at all.

Which may have been why Benetton returned to something approaching shock advertising with its ‘Unhate' print campaign of 2011. The PhotoShopped images showed world leaders with conflicting views throwing aside their differences and themselves into one another's arms, locked in a passionate kiss. And so US President Barack Obama was pictured snogging Chinese leader Hu Jintao, then-French President Nicolas Sarkozy puckered up for Angela Merkel and Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas was shown kissing Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

A picture of Pope Benedict XVI passionately kissing Egyptian imam Ahmed Mohamed el-Tayeb was inevitably denounced by the Vatican, which threatened legal action. Benetton withdrew it, but not before it had generated reams of media coverage, tweets and blog posts. The campaign was the work of Fabrica, not Toscani himself – but it was firmly in his spirit. It also showed that, in a world where advertisers
strive to create material that will generate a buzz across the social web, ‘shockvertising' has a role to play.

The German conundrum

On the face of it, the advertising cultures of Italy and Germany don't appear to have much in common. And yet they share certain problems. They are both seen as lacking in creativity – or at least, in the kind of accessible, border-busting creativity that reaps international awards. And they are both accused of insularity. Although Spain has traditionally had strong links with South America (see
Chapter 15
, Latin spirit), and both Britain and France are the hubs of multinational communications combines, German agencies have struggled to expand beyond their own borders. ‘For [us], 80 million people is quite good enough,' one of the country's top agency bosses told
Campaign
magazine in 2004 (‘Germany's agencies to watch', 10 September).

One explanation for Germany's lack of creative edge might be its strong manufacturing base. Britain, like Holland and Spain, has a trading history. Germany is a producer. Thus Britain makes terrific ads for cars – but Germany actually makes cars. The country has also lacked a central creative hub, a Soho or a Madison Avenue, to act as a Petri dish for talent. German creativity is shared between Frankfurt, Hamburg, Düsseldorf and, increasingly, Berlin. The relative fidelity of German clients may also contribute to a more complacent creative environment. Finally, the very late arrival of commercial television, in 1979, has also been blamed.

But early into the new millennium, Germany's stolid, housebound image began fraying at the edges. In 2003, when McDonald's challenged its agencies worldwide to come up with a new branding campaign, a German shop called Heyer & Partners won, creating the basis for the global ‘I'm lovin' it' positioning. Nimble creative agencies emerged, particularly in the digital arena, to take the place of the established giants.

A clear if depressing sign that times were changing came in 2010 when iconic agency Springer & Jacoby filed for bankruptcy. It had been one of the most significant operations in the history of German advertising, along with Jung von Matt… and Scholz & Friends.

Juergen Scholz is another of those ‘founding fathers' who play a role in every country's advertising history. A respected creative, in the sixties
he was one of the founding members of Team, which later became Team/BBDO. In 1981 he broke away to set up Scholz & Friends in Hamburg. Just over 10 years later he retired, having created what local trade magazine
Horizont
described as ‘the agency of the decade'. Following his departure, the Bates network moved in and acquired 80 per cent of the agency.